On July 9, Anthropic launched a campaign that stands out from the usual AI marketing. It’s called ‘Inviting hard questions’ — and instead of explaining how great the products are, the company asks the public for its hardest questions about AI.
What it’s about
Anthropic is actively asking people to send in their toughest questions: about AI’s effects on jobs, society, and families. About how the potential of AI for science and medicine can actually be realized. And in return, the company says it will publicly track the specific actions it’s taking to address those questions.
The campaign page highlights questions like: ‘Who decides the rules for AI?’, ‘Can AI give my children a better future?’, ‘Does AI make the world a more dangerous place?’, and ‘Can AI help scientists cure diseases?‘
Not out of nowhere
The campaign didn’t come from nowhere. Anthropic laid months of groundwork: it surveyed 52,000 Americans about their biggest hopes and concerns, interviewed 81,000 Claude users across 159 countries through the ‘Anthropic Interviewer’, ran dozens of focus groups, and studied anonymized usage data. The TV spot was created by London agency Mother.
So it is a marketing campaign — but one with an unusual mechanic: collect public concerns, then publicly account for them.
My take
I’m skeptical of campaigns like this at first. An AI company that poses the ‘hard questions’ about AI itself also controls which questions get the spotlight and which don’t. That’s clever communication.
But there’s one part that counts: the promise to publicly track what the company does. That’s something you can measure it against. A campaign that puts ‘Does AI make the world more dangerous?’ on a poster puts itself on the hook — because now people are watching. Whether it ends in real transparency or just polished self-presentation won’t be decided by the ad, but by what actually gets documented over the coming months. I’ll be watching.
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